Daft Property - Irish Property News

The hangover of Ireland's property boom: Abandoned ghost estates and lifeless houses stripped of their worth... Anyone against debt forgiveness should read this dispatch from a ghost estate... and thank God it's them instead of you... Rhoda Brogan stands at the front door of her three-bed semi, quietly surveying the abandoned, lifeless houses that surround her. In the centre of the estate there is a green area, wildly overgrown with weeds and nettles and circled by a cracked road and street lights that don't work. It is eerily calm; there are no cars driving around, no children playing - the only sound is the wind. All of a sudden, Rhoda’s eyes narrow and focus on an abandoned home directly across the road and she considers something for a moment before noticing the open windows. ‘Oh my God! Someone has got into that house since I left this morning,’ she says, quickly crossing the street with her four-year-old daughter, Saoirse, in tow. Around the back of the em

AFFORDABLE housing schemes will be scrapped under new plans to encourage people to rent, instead of purchase, their home. Housing Minister Willie Penrose will today announce a major shift in housing policy. The State will no longer help middle-income earners to buy a property by subsidising the cost. Affordable homes were offered to first-time buyers who could not afford to purchase on the open market because prices were too high. Affordable homes were different from social housing, where a local authority provided a house and the tenant paid rent. Under the affordable scheme, owners had to live in the property and could earn up to €60,000 a year. Subsidies of up to 40pc of the asking price were on offer, and in the region of 30,000 affordable homes were sold since the early 1990s. However, the new housing policy says that "over-stimulation" of the housing market was a key factor in the economic downturn, and that people chose to buy homes "on the basis of

Number of 'ghost' estates four times initial estimate... THE number of 'ghost' housing estates stands at 2,700 -- four times higher than thought, according to the first official government estimate. This means that taxpayers face an even bigger bill for the mess caused by developers and the banks. Ghost estates are defined as those that contain unfinished, unoccupied, or partially occupied house and apartment blocks. The first government-ordered audit of how many such estates exist has now revealed the extent of the problem. A previous estimate, earlier this year, calculated there were 621. Many of the estates in the new total of 2,700 are located in the midlands and north-west, the Irish Independent has learnt. The report outlines six categories of properties,ranging from those which are 'turn key''-- finished but unoccupied-- to estates where only preliminary groundwork has taken place. Other estates are partially occupied, but have half-built houses and a

House prices will keep falling this year despite growth... HOUSE prices will continue to fall this year despite a return to economic growth, the Government has warned. And a report from the Department of the Environment warns that almost 200,000 homeowners are facing negative equity by the end of the year -- where one-in-four mortgage holders will be forced to pay off loans that exceed the value of their homes. The Housing Market Overview 2009 also says price recovery will take longer outside major urban centres, and that the downturn may be "longer or more severe" than expected . This means that demolition could be the only option for the thousands of housing units due to come under the control of NAMA because they are unlikely to ever sell. Unsold Officials from the department have begun a count of the number of unsold housing units across the country, with some estimates saying up to 300,000 may be empty. "The International Monetary Fund has analysed house-price cycle